My mother is a voracious reader. When I was young, our bookshelves were lined with Book-of-the-Month Club picks, Reader’s Digest Condensed Books, and selections from her Book Club. The outlier was an anthology of Robert Frost’s poems. Inside the cover, which had faded from jade green to the hue of a succulent garden, my mother had written to my father, in fountain pen ink the color of blueberries, "To Joe, for your love of Robert Frost and my love for you." It was dated 1961, the year before they married...